Antarctica:
The Blue Continentby David McGonigal, Lynn Woodworth
Book Description: Illustrated guide to Antarctica's environment,
geography, wildlife, and history.

Antarctica: The Blue Continent is a superbly illustrated and easy-to-understand
book that reveals this polar region's ruthless majesty and natural beauty.

The environment is Earth's harshest, coldest, most inhospitable climate.
A staggering 98% of the continent is covered with ice averaging 1.4 miles
in depth; 90% of the world's ice is found in there. In spite of the cold
and ice, Antarctica's shores and waters are home to an amazing variety
of vegetation and indigenous wildlife-seals, sea lions, whales, penguins
and sea birds-that have evolved in extraordinary ways to adapt to their
unforgiving habitat. The book features natural phenomena such as a glacier
made of jagged, Jurassic-era rock instead of ice, and entire mountain ranges
filled to their peaks with snow.

In the chapters on polar exploration, Antarctica profiles Captain Cook,
Roald Amundsen, Shackleton, Scott, and others. Readers will experience
why this continent has inspired so much effort and heroism in the quest
to discover its secrets.

This book is a concise version of the authors' 608-page Antarctica and
the Arctic.
Hardcover from Firefly Books

The
Last Place on Earthby Roland Huntford, Paul Theroux
On December 14, 1911, the classical age of polar exploration ended
when Norway's Roald Amundsen conquered the South Pole. His competitor for
the prize, Britain's Robert Scott, arrived one month later--but died on
the return with four of his men only 11 miles from their next cache of
supplies. But it was Scott, ironically, who became the legend, Britain's
heroic failure, "a monument to sheer ambition and bull-headed persistence.
His achievement was to perpetuate the romantic myth of the explorer as
martyr, and ... to glorify suffering and self-sacrifice as ends in themselves."
The world promptly forgot about Amundsen.

Biographer Ronald Huntford's attempt to restore Amundsen to glory, first
published in 1979 under the title Scott and Amundsen, has been thawed as
part of the Modern Library Exploration series, captained by Jon Krakauer
(of Into Thin Air fame). The Last Place on Earth is a complex and fascinating
account of the race for this last great terrestrial goal, and it's pointedly
geared toward demythologizing Scott. Though this was the age of the amateur
explorer, Amundsen was a professional: he left little to chance, apprenticed
with Eskimos, and obsessed over every detail. While Scott clung fast to
the British rule of "No skis, no dogs," Amundsen understood that both were
vital to survival, and they clearly won him the Pole.

Amundsen in Huntford's view is the "last great Viking" and Scott his
bungling opposite: "stupid ... recklessly incompetent," and irresponsible
in the extreme--failings that cost him and his teammates their lives. Yet
for all of Scott's real or exaggerated faults, he understood far better
than Amundsen the power of a well-crafted sentence. Scott's diaries were
recovered and widely published, and if the world insisted on lionizing
Scott, it was partly because he told a better story. Huntford's bias aside,
it's clear that both Scott and Amundsen were valiant and deeply flawed.
"Scott ... had set out to be an heroic example. Amundsen merely wanted
to be first at the pole. Both had their prayers answered." --Svenja
Soldovieri - Amazon.comPaperback from Modern Library

Shackletonby Roland Huntford
Sir Ernest Shackleton, the Anglo-Irish explorer, never achieved his
goal of reaching the South Pole, though he was knighted in 1909 for having
come within 100 miles. With bravery matched only by his theatricality,
Shackleton sought to top that accomplishment by landing on one side of
Antarctica and traveling the width of the icy continent by sledge. What
might have been a great exploratory journey turned into a raw struggle
for survival when his ship became trapped in pack ice, and he was forced
to lead his team on a desperate trek across hundreds of miles of the world's
most dangerous terrain. He made it home, but even his stature as one of
Edwardian England's greatest heroes could not save Shackleton from financial
risk taking; he ended his life mired in debt. Roland Huntford's biography
presents a balanced and lively portrait of a man who was, depending on
which of his contemporaries you asked, a national hero or a contemptible
rogue. --Robert McNamara - Amazon.com(Paperback)

Through the First Antarctic Nightby Frederick A. Cook
(Paperback)
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Books

South
with Endurance: Shackleton's Antarctic Expedition, 1914-1917by Frank Hurley
Sir Ernest Shackleton's trans-Antarctic expedition of 1914-1917 was
one of the great feats of human endurance -- one vividly captured in the
powerful and dramatic pictures taken by Frank Hurley, the expedition's
official photographer. The Publisher